Thing is, they're partially right. Revolution means war and war is violent. Innocent people will be murdered. Sick children. Homeless people. The elderly. Perfectly healthy random people. Pets, wild animals, you name it. Stuff that shouldn't have to die will die. That's the nature of war.
The reason it's still worth it is that we're already at war. It's just that largely only one side is waging that war. Innocent people are being murdered under the status quo every single day. Sick children, homeless people, the elderly, perfectly healthy random people, pets, wild animals, you name it. They're already being murdered. Revolution only looks violent and unreasonable from the privileged position that the status quo isn't violent.
If you think it's a tragedy when people can't get their groceries and medicine, boy do I have some news for you!
See the "2 reigns of terror" quote
When a thousand people die in a day, it's a tragedy. When a million die over the course of a century, it's a statistic.
Man it's a good thing structural violence isn't a thing. Otherwise incremental reform (or more honestly, its vain pursuit under bourgeois democracy) would have its own death toll that is being assumed as the normal, immutable state of things
The logical chain they're missing is the fact that Capitalism is very literally using the sick and disabled as human shields - "Don't hurt me, or little Timmy won't get his chemotherapy!"
Tagging your essay with #de-radicalisation is literally the soyest thing imagibable
Essay? This wouldn't even get a C- if you turned this in at Highschool.
Why do people think the revolution is one singular magical eschatological even that will happen everywhere at the same time, and involves destryoing everything? Why did i believe that at one point? Where did that idea come from and why does it persist?
Not reading history outside of fantasized media
This, only revolution you see in mass media/consciousness in the west puts it forth as some sort of pseudomaterialist rapture. When really history isn't quite linear and easy, you could say revolutions began long before its obvious and it doesn't matter what precious pearl-clutching scratched libs think, we're already in several. You'll get all sorts of flavors of slow and steady and quick fascistic collapse, which is what they desire in their scratched lil dark heart.
Christian brainworms i think
Dual power? Never heard of it.
Also, the cajones on someone saying only the privileged support revolution when it revolutions have only happened in the most destitute places on Earth.
This is what you get when your idea of a revolution exists in a vacuum with no events preceding it or material conditions facilitating it.
This would be the best argument against revolution if revolutions occurred spontaneously after enough people believed in it.
It also assumes all life and society just comes to a screeching hault when the government changes hands. Until checks start bouncing, most people are just going to continue going to work and doing their jobs as normal.
Why is someone up in the sky screaming "unfalsifiable orthodoxy?" What could the yellow sky man mean by that?
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” -Mark Twain
-Happybadger
before you start a revolution, you have to submit detailed plan and schedule of your movements to your local fbi headquarters, so that they can ensure steady workings of proletarians (who will otherwise crumble into ash when shareholders can't answer their emails)
also also, think of the poor babies of the plantation owners, who didn't get to see their daddy
With all sincerity, emphasis, and contempt, fuck them kids. They'll probably just grow into aggrieved gusanos by the time all is said and done.
de-radicalization
People who ideology-hop into marxism and plant no roots by reading theory will just as quickly ideology-hop out of marxism. Simple as.
Also, now?! This is the point in history where you want to be less radical?
I guarantee you someone close to tumblr OP suddenly had it all click, and what they were saying started getting too scary to the tumblr lib. This... Vomitus, is the end result.
Sometimes I think I'm too doomer, but this is what real defeatism looks like. Pure "I don't care" energy distilled into a thread.
Gonna need a list of revolutions where all the children in the hospitals spontaneously died.
Oh wait guess what... Didn't happen. Even when shit gets really bad the hospitals make it work right up until you create literal famine conditions like Gaza. Shut up lib.
I get what you’re saying and largely I agree, but I think it’s more honest to admit that unfortunately people are going to die during a revolution. The thing is these same people are going to die if they can’t pay their medical bills, which the libs will never admit to.
People are going to die but claiming that every kid in a hospital is going to spontaneously combust is fucking ridiculous.
People are going to die because there's going to be a literal civil war that occurs, with all the problems of a civil war that there usually are. Generally speaking neither side wants to kill everyone in hospitals in a civil war though, they both have to try and appeal to the population so "everyone in the hospital died" doesn't tend to go down well.
With medical provisions that aren't getting produced in the country anymore aid agencies pick up the slack.
To the extent libs will admit this, it's regrettable but necessary. Cold blood beats in these hearts
Those people are currently dying and would be saved by a revolution. They just described what's happening right now.
EXACTLY. we need to build new systems of care because the american system fails and eventually kills everyone below the morality line
these new systems WILL be violently opposed, which will require self defense.
I don't know where in the world you live and how rich you have to be to think "slow steady and long term changes" could possibly be thought of as positive considering the entire world has obviously been on a very steady downward spiral since like the 60s.
not the entire world
Literacy is oppression for those who can't read.
Because, of course, the one and only defining trait of every revolution is taking a flamethrower to the paediatric unit of your local hospital.
"Fuck them kids, bro!"
- Che Guevara
Soooo, these people think the American revolution was a bad thing? The Haitian revolution? French Revolution? Do they think the Vietnamese should have just rolled over and been content with being French subjects because otherwise the supply of baguettes might have been interrupted? Once again, libs love every prior revolution and hate the idea of the revolution around the corner.
Oh they definitely think the Haitian revolution was bad
They're still making Haiti pay for their revolution to this day
Oh libs do hate French Revolution, they even wrote its own Black Book.
Another great example about how disconnected the average westerner is from the material condition that most of the world faces. If you even take a second to look at the conditions that were necessary to preempt revolutions like that seen in China, Russia, Haiti, or as we see now the resistance of the Palestinians it becomes quite clear the question is not whether there will be medicine for sick children or whether child support comes through. The reality is that there will be NO hospitals and NO organization to even process the concept of child support. The liberal tendency to put the cart before the horse and insert their idealized concept of revolution into what they think revolutionary times might look like is what I personally see as one of the greatest divides in thought between them and some of the older relatives in my family I have had the chance to talk to. For my older relatives that lived through the war and revolution it was do or die. Just goes to show how far away any real chance of revolution is here in the west.
The liberal tendency to put the cart before the horse and insert their idealized concept of revolution into what they think revolutionary times might look like is what I personally see as one of the greatest divides in thought between them and some of the older relatives in my family I have had the chance to talk to.
the young-adult dystopia novel industry has been a disaster for the human race
These are the people who see revolution not as one stage of an ongoing struggle to improve the world, but as a spontaneous rapture-like event divorced from the conditions before. The kind of people who've read no theory or performed no praxis and assume that socialists want the system to be violently upheaved and rebuilt with themselves at the top with no further changes. They've never heard of dual power, of communities taking care of their own, or even Food Not Bombs feeding the needy for free
I fucking hate tumblr left anti-communists (liberals)
I think they're the single most frustrating type of liberal. They're the closest to "getting it" among all the liberals because many of them are queer and/or women and so have experienced real oppression unlike many in the Reddit crowd, which is largely male and techbro-aligned. When I occasionally interact with them, I just want to make them read State and Revolution (or the equivalent anarchist text, both Marxism and anarchism are superior to liberalism) because many of them do just need that final push out of liberal orthodox thinking into a better and more explanatory ideology.
But their closeness to the truth in terms of how society is patriarchal and this needs to be changed and a more queer society created (albeit without a Marxist feminist understanding) makes it all the more frustrating when people like those in the image above come along and confidently assert that revolutions shouldn't be done because they lead to innocent people dying because they haven't even heard of the concept of structural violence, or other excuses for not adopting a revolutionary approach. Their automatic dismissal of totalitarian tankies who want to redistribute your toothbrush as well as the dismissal of anarchists for having too lofty/unrealistic a goal, ultimately leads to them navel-gazing uselessly in a corner somewhere or, at best, attempting the entirely pointless task of pushing elected officials to the left, and thus they're on the side of the fascist status quo.
Every time i see some navel-gazing horseshit like this out of comfortable, overprivileged crackers like these, all I can think is that nah, fuck all the bullshit; Amerikans are absolutely acceptable collateral when shit pops off. Because it will pop off, and it will not be the left that gets it popping. We are going to have to fight a war that will be brought to us. We are going to have to bleed fascists dry; and it's specifically because the bloated, overprivileged larvae of the professional managerial class, that expected to grow into nepobaby sinecurials, couldn't be bothered to wake up, grow up, and realize that they're ACTUALLY in the same slowly-boiling pot as all the rest of us.
And half of them will sell us out when that time comes, to preserve the comfort and 'peace' that they put over everyone else's agony. That they paper over the unpleasantries of their life with. They won't even think about what happens to us after they make that call.
Nah, they wanna talk about 'they're not acceptable collateral'? No. Every settler; every colonizer's son, every colonizer's daughter, is acceptable collateral. More than enough of my people have been lynched to justify it. These Amerikans have never been on any kind of motion that isn't "making sure the treat dispenser is still running at the expense of 'the minorities' that they'd have a HEART ATTACK if they saw moving into their neighborhoods". These are not my allies. These are not my comrades. These are not my countrymen.
This might be a reasonable concern if the current governments weren't already killing and causing suffering en masse.
Why is my life right now considered "acceptable collateral" but revolution to solve that is wrong?
I love how these self described "leftists" and "progressives" only ever say things that serve to reinforce the idea that nothing should or can change. Regardless of if these things are true or not, at the end of the day the function of these statements is to reinforce the status quo. Yet these dipshits will claim to be progressive, to want change. Don't buy it for a fucking second. They're privileged enough to live in a world that seems "peaceful" to them, and that's all they care about. They want that world to stay exactly the same, "safe" for them at any cost to anyone else. The irony is the violence they think doesn't occur under the status quo is coming for them too, it's coming for us all.
I do wonder if they think similarly about potential revolutions in the state-designated Bad Countries like Iran, Russia, China, the DPRK, etc. They'd still be dipshits, but I could at least give them a small point for consistency if they also believe that, say, we shouldn't try and create a revolution in Iran or Russia because innocent people would die. I very much doubt they would, though; that's probably "different" to the situation in the US (read: the lives of foreigners and minorities are worth so little to them that even incredibly violent revolutions where millions die would be worth it to install a comprador regime friendly to Western megacorporations)
no they definitely would be happy if a colour revolution happened in Iran, reddit reposter is an israeli zionazi
Of course not, they salivate on the mere prospect because authoritarism blah blah. They all agree with Chumpsky saying "The fall of Soviet Union was the victory for socialism". Anyone saying this after witnessing last 33 years is at best completely ignorant.
This radlib navel-gazing pisses me off so much. Not just because its completely detached from the reality that these people are going to be killed in the exact way they're describing by the systems in place currently, but because it's always trotted out to scold and tut-tut people for being reprehensible tankies presumably to preserve the fragile ego of some imperial chauvinist.
Its weird how the government, when attacked, can immediately turn off the power/water/gas/food/medicine to defend itself like that.
Ok I got an idea: we take care of each other. Before, after, during the revolution. And if people tell us to stop, we fuck em up.
What do you mean the revolution was the friends and anticapitalist structures we made along the way?? SHENANIGANS!!
But HOW will the medication factories work without the CEO and the shareholders? Who will make the medicine? The workers themselves? Preposterous! Without shareholders, material infrastructure ceases to exist. I am very smart.
But, but, how will the chemical reactions occur without the profit motive! what could incentivize them?!?!
But there's people who rely on government programs to eat and live.
Just fucking steal shit?
No no don't you understand when the government goes away the section 8 housing vanishes as if by magic, and people on higher stories will fall and get hurt because the building instantly ceased to exist.
The magical government dwarves will mine out the base layer and create an unsupported section, causing a cave in. I can't believe leftists want to kill everyone with dust from the fall.
Everyone claims they would pull the lever in the Trolley Problem, yet here is an actual example of it.
Sounds like these einsteins have never experienced poverty or any kind of an undeprivileged position where medication and access to healthcare is systemically disrubted all the damn time as a system feature.
Where are all the Westerners with actual access to even basic healthcare right the f now? I mean this is again a post that only reveales the privilege and ignorance of the posters.
This level of ignorance can only come from a consistent choice to not aknowledge the endless and constant violence the system we live in does. On every level. We live in a system of violence that was built on violence and is upheld by it. Ffs...
Almost as if the working class needs to seize the means of production
Also insert Mark Twain quote about the terror of the revolution being dwarfed by the terror of the old regime. How many thousands of children with medical needs are being neglected, abused, or their families indebted by the cruelty of capitalism, right now?
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror —that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Ch. 13
the redditor who posted this is an israeli zionazi is anyone surprised???
Zionists and weepily browbeating anyone who doesn't want to live with a boot on their neck, name a more iconic duo
Dumbass uses the database analogy, but apparently has never encountered the situation where a database is fundamentally ill-equipped to handle the task you require, and attempts to bolt on band aids will result in collapse of the database.
Third commenter describing awful shit that happens under capitalism as a justification to keep capitalism around lmao
Just reform the capitalism we currently have at a glacial pace. We might (definitely will) be destroyed by climate change if we do this, but at least I won't be personally affected.
The revolution can be peaceful if the bourgeoisie and fascists let it be peaceful (they won't)
We have to start thinking of vulnerable people we as Socialists care for as the bougies' hostages
I think about how if the revolution doesn't happen then 10s of thousands of people will continue to die due to lack of basic services like healthcare and food and transportation and heating and housing on an ongoing basis every single year.
Until the revolution every kid with significant medical needs is in peril of not getting the help they need and every hospital is on the brink of collapse if one too many nurses call in sick that day and millions go without getting any care at all.
Violence is invisible to libs until it becomes personally inconvenient to them.
Diabetes is a death sentence without medical care and some people are just born with it. Any society that pretends to give a shit about the sanctity of life wouldn't be charging people to be alive for something they had and have no control over.
Yet here we fucking are. Because an extreme minority of privileged ghouls needs to make 1% more profit every year.
taking my hedge clippers to the local hospital when the revolution starts (killing children is my main motivation); I think there will be an obvious power cable to just snip off; I get confused and ask the doctors where the huge power cable for the hospital is; they don't know either
It's the big boxes in he basement. They hum with revolutionary fervor and demand the crackling surge of liberation be freed from its copper chains
this is the "why are you hitting yourself" of ideology
How would i buy a lenin funko pop in the middle of a revolution? You haven't considered actual praxis in your argument
Well then I guess the government shouldn't have build their headquarters under hospitals. :just-Zionist-thoughts:
What alienation and commodity fetishism does to a mf.
Also overhinking. Lots and lots of overthinking
Just because they're firing on all cylinders doesn't mean they're going anywhere lol
Capitalism is constantly telling everybody else on the planet they're acceptable collateral damage but it also doesn't improve life for anybody except about 500 people.
We can not make a Revolution because the Hypothetical Kid with Medical Needs will die in the Hypothetical Hospital without Generators..
And that's why these Actual Kids must Actually Die in the Actual Meantime
dont let the good be the enemy of the hypotheticall bad that i can imagine ..
Read the Bread Book
ONE HUDNRED POUNDS OF GRAPES A SEASON FROM MY SMALL HOT HOUSE
BIG BLACK JUICY TABLE GRAPES WANTING TO BE EATEN
ONE HUNDRED POUNDS OF GRAPES IN MY HOT HOUSE HEATEN
MarkTwainTwoTerrors.jpg
I'll give them the benefit of doubt because this is where I was once about Revolution. I believed in peaceful revolution because I was blind to the scale and responsibility of the violence all around me. I still believe that a successful revolution should be in large part peaceful, but I also know that won't happen unless those in power are pacified, since they won't go peacefully.
More importantly though, the sick, disabled, and poor don't need to loose access to medicine and social assistance. Isn't that part of the point of building a dual power? Of joining an org and engaging in direct action? How are revolutionaries supposed to govern, facilitate the distribution of resources, and all the other things if they aren't already doing so before?
"THERE were two 'Reigns of Terror,' if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves."
These are actually issues that your revolutionary project needs to be able to rise to meet.
